TED Thursday: A More Immersive Reality

"Instead of providing gamers with better and more immersive alternatives to reality, I want all of us to become responsible for providing the world with a better and more immersive reality."

Jane McGonigal

 
From McGonigal's recent talk at TED titled

'Gaming can make a better world'

“There is an economist named Edward Castronova. His work is brilliant. He looks at why people are investing so much time and energy and money, in online worlds. And he says, 'We're witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments.' And he's an economist. So, he's rational. And he says ... (Laughter) Not like me -- I'm a game designer; I'm exuberant. But he says, that this makes perfect sense, because gamers can achieve more in online worlds than they can in real life. They can have stronger social relationships in games than they can have in real life. They get better feedback and feel more rewarded in games than they do in real life. So, he says for now it makes perfect sense for gamers to spend more time in virtual worlds than the real world. Now, I also agree that that is rational, for now. But it is not, by any means, an optimal situation. We have to start making the real world more like a game.”

“We've got all these amazing gamers, we've got these games that are kind of pilots of what we might do, but none of them have saved the real world yet. Well I hope that you will agree with me that gamers are a human resource that we can use to do real-world work, that games are a powerful platform for change. We have all these amazing superpowers, blissful productivity, the ability to weave a tight social fabric, this feeling of urgent optimism, and the desire for epic meaning.”

“I really hope that we can come together to play games that matter, to survive on this planet for another century. And that's my hope that you will join me in making and playing games like this. When I look forward to the next decade, I know two things for sure, that we can make any future we can imagine, and we can play any games we want. So, I say let the world-changing games begin.”

***
 
Will Wright makes toys that make worlds

“Chris was kind of wondering what kind of gods that the players would become. Because if you think about it, you know, you're going to have 15-year-olds, 20-year-olds, whatever, flying around this universe. And they might be a nurturing god. They, you know, might be boot-strapping life on planets, trying to terra-form and kind of spread civilization. You might be a vengeful god and going out and conquesting, because you actually can do that, you can go in and attack other intelligent races. You might be a networking god, kind of building alliances, which you can also do in the game, or just curious, going around and wanting to explore as much as you possibly can.”

“But basically, the reason why I make toys like this is because I think if there's one difference I could possibly make in the world, that I would choose to make, it's that I would like to somehow give people just a little bit better calibration on long-term thinking. Because I think most of the problems that our world is facing right now is the result of short-term thinking, and the fact that it is so hard for us to think 50, 100 years, or 1,000 years out. And I think by giving kids toys like this and letting them replay dynamics, you know, very long-term dynamics over the short term, and getting some sense of what we're doing now, what it's going to be like in 100 years, I think probably is the most effective thing I can be doing, probably, to help the world. And so that's why I think, personally, that toys can change the world.”

***
 
As Real As Your Life, from David Perry's talk on videogames
 
***
 
Using toys and games to teach philosophical concepts and to literally change the world from the ground up via gaming are both fairly radical notions.  I included the short film on videogame addiction in the mix as it relates to both of the previous talks rather nicely, or so I thought.
 
Games are integral to Surrealism and they are intrinsic to the underlying cultures of Riskail, including the virts and the isocolonials who have withdrawn into their fortified arcologies to totally immerse themselves in their games and constructs, having no further use for what once passed for consensual reality.  Polite Society recognizes the utility of various forms of gambling and duelling as means of both maintaining the peace and providing an outlet for competition and the regulation of opinion.  In that respect things are a bit more medieval than expected.  You literally have to back-up your opinions with force of arms, not just in academia, but in society as a whole.  In Academia things are less straight-forward and there are far more opportunities for ambushes, assassination attempts and worse.  There may be honor amongst thieves, but precious little amongst the grad students jockeying for a shot at their mentors and their position within the hierarchy.
 
The practice of utilizing ritualized games distributed via social networks to solve large-scale problems, plan macro-scale projects, or to wage distributed warfare against various Outside Interests, is nothing new to Riskail.  Ever since the Gamers of Jontolon won their bloodless war of independence without firing so much as a single shot, gaming has been an accepted, proven and honored component of the Rituals and Codes of Civilization.  Hives, nodes and complexes of gamers who've eschewed meatforms and colonized various dataspheric regions enmasse are recognized as equivalent to many similar-sized city-states.  Some of these nodes have become incredibly influential, such as the Estarza Goldrim who are engaged in the macroscale terraforming of worlds along the periphery of those accessed by the primary gate-networks or the Ielzuud Collekt, an eccentric collective that is obsessed with mega-engineering of system-scale construct-artforms in orbit around obscure stars outside the bounds of the Known Worlds.  Another group of disembodied gamers occupy the so-called Green Level from which they disperse an inconceivable array of biomorphisms across the void in their efforts to foment panspermia, not as a past theory, but as a present practice.  Others are less grandiose either in scale or efforts, but they are forces to be reckoned with nonetheless.
 
Another gamerphorm are the Oracles, (see illo above) massive and often impassive sculpted material-form entities that act as avatars for gamer-collectives or open-ended contributor networks that listen in to supplicants and plaintiffs seeking solutions to various problems which they then voluntarily take on, wrestle with, and either solve or address in their own ways.  Oracles wander across the settled regions of Known Worlds, some travel widely, others remain mostly within one urban district.  All of them are dedicated composite entities that originally had no real personality apart from the vestiges and aspects left-behind by those who chose to work through them from the dataside.  Over time they have become unique individuals in their own right, some of whom have adopted distinct names for themselves, and a few who have developed their own processing capabilities apart and aside from those of the virts and softborn who still collaborate with them, and who are now sometimes their petitioners as well.
 
Games embody humanity's attempts at unravelling the dynamics of chance or expressing and exploring the interplay of probability, or so say the gamblemancers who treat everything in their immediate experience as a sacred game of chance played between them and the universe.  As far as sects go, they are minor and relatively obscure, considered mostly harmless, and uncommon enough that no registered study has been undertaken by any reputable academic.
 
The Casinos of Riskail are notorious for offering their patrons a chance to participate in any game they care to mention.  The Bosses take this pledge to heart like a mantra seared across the mechanism that passes for their hearts and they go to extreme lengths to accomodate the whims and wishes of their patrons irregardless of ethics, morality, legalities or anything else.  As long as the price is right, they'll set things up, no questions asked.  There are no judges in the Casinos, apart from those who might be amongst the other players in the crowd, and they're none too eager to be identified.  Morality is best left at the door, or so goes the old saying attributed to Parmedreon, one of the last known aspects of the Embodied Principle of Honesty.  Of course Parmedreon was murdered in an alley by assailant or assailants unknown and so far unapprehended.  It's only been three hundred years, give or take a decade.
 
The Arenas are directly tied into the Casinos, and the gladiatorial pens are Casino property, which makes them morally autonomous as excluded sovreign territories that are technically no longer part of Polite Society, despite all appearances to the contrary.  The Casinos are a culture unto themselves, one that operates along opaque and byzantine rules known only unto itself and those who gain admission to the virtulects, philosatars or other dataside communities that have elected to segregate themselves behind the black voidwalls of the Casinos' residential datasperes where they engage in games so far removed from anything that the occupants of meatspace can even conceive that it is literally unspeakable, unthinkable and unimaginable.  Even the AI require dedicated filters to interface with the Casinos.
 
But not all gamers in Riskail are disembodied or virts.  There are numerous groups who sponsor competitors who settle new worlds, explore ancient ruins, develop trade routes, just about any activity that results in some sort of economic or social gain for some group out there has its own sponsors, supporters and circuit of competitions, many of which are fed into the datasphere and voyeuristically enjoyed by uncountable numbers of virtual spectators for all time to come.  Any and every form of adventure is a commercial commodity, one that can make more money for a roving band of mercenaries than fighting ever could.
 
There are also the games of the sorcerers which they play at their various salons, museum-gatherings, gallery-showings, and other rendezvous-style events.  New spells are demonstrated prior to being released into the Open Source Databases and competitions are held where specific old spells are redesigned or modified and the results of each competitor's efforts are compared and voted on by a jury of their peers.  Contests are held that play off of the old idea of cut-ups, one-in-the-other or the exquisite corpse games of old.  Only with real scrolls, actual objects and sometimes fresh corpses.  Homunculi-gladiators face-off in clandestine combats outside the Casinos, at least until the Bosses find out and move to bring the fights under house sanction and they get their cut, one way or another.  The sponsored contests between competing sorcerers and biomantists, genartists and scylloi-traditionalists are some of the most highly anticipated, violently fought and lucrative events that the Bosses have found and they have made great efforts to recruit and sponsor more and more up-and-coming competitors, often allowing dangerous individuals from outside the established cliques, cadres or colleges to come and try their luck in the arenas.  People love an underdog.  And the media surrounding these competitors serves as the fodder for countless telenovelas, psychodramas and other popular forms of mass entertainment.
 
Each of the Grand Houses of Riskail maintains a pool of competitors who represent them in the various games, both sacred and profane, that take place throughout the year.  Sometimes the Houses use the competitions to settle old disputes, other times it's a way to avoid ruinous internecine wars.  Some of the newer Houses have disdained to compete and lost their credibility or found themselves besieged by rioters who demanded that they field a competitor for one of the Four Great Games which have been a tradition in Riskail for over a thousand years.
 
The Great Games combine the Olympics with a planetary-scale circus and what amounts to a small-scale ritualized war within a contained space that is set-off from the rest of the world just for the Games and every gladiator, combat-thespian, cutter-clown, wrestler and extremiac in the near vicinty of Riskail participates.  It's a good way to make a killing, amongst other things.  It's certainly immersive.

TED Thursday: Earthday Thoughts

It's Thursday and it's Earthday as well.  So I've pulled three interesting ideas from TED, again, to share with you.  If this works out, I think that I'll start doing 3 From TED Thursdays as a feature.  Depending on feed-back.  If you find this interesting or useful, let me know.

"Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power -- economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed."

&

“I believe we can accomplish great and profitable things within a new conceptual framework—one that values our legacy, honors diversity, and feeds ecosystems and societies . . . It is time for designs that are creative, abundant, prosperous, and intelligent from the start.”

William McDonough on cradle-to-cradle design.
t
***

"...It seems to me that the example, the tools we use to change the world, ought to be beautiful in themselves. You know, that it's not just enough to survive. We've got to make something better than what we've got. And I think that we will."

Alex Steffen on Worldchanging and Sustainability.

***

"All buildings today have something in common. They're made using Victorian technologies. This involves blueprints, industrial manufacturing and construction using teams of workers. All of this effort results in an inert object. And that means that there is a one-way transfer of energy from our environment into our homes and cities. This is not sustainable. I believe that the only way that it is possible for us to construct genuinely sustainable homes and cities is by connecting them to nature, not insulating them from it."
&
"Secondly, these metabolic materials have some of the properties of living systems, which means they can perform in similar ways. They can expect to have a lot of forms and functions within the practice of architecture. And finally, an observer in the future marveling at a beautiful structure in the environment, may find it almost impossible to tell whether this structure has been created by a natural process or an artificial one."

Rachel Armstrong on Architecture That Repairs Itself, using metabolic materials such as protocells.
You can also find her novel The Gray's Anatomy at Amazon.  I haven't read it yet, but I'm considering it.***

Excellent stuff.  Most of this would have been mind-blowing science fiction just a few years ago.  Now it's out in the world, being applied and getting deployed and developed for real.  Cities should not only be places where people live, but ought to be alive themselves...or at least there is every indication that there will be cities that develop into living meta-organisms.  Maybe they'll develop a personality unto themselves.  Consider the implication of a sort of reverse-anthropomorphism; instead of projecting human values/traits onto inanimate structures, we'll be experiencing these structure's traits and values in their own right.  Will we get along or will there be conflicts between living cities and their inhabitants?  Will cities develop sentience?  Should they?  Who would oppose such a thing, and who would push for it to happen against all opposition?  What will a truly New City be like?

Riskail is a mostly desolate world, pock-marked and heavily cratered, where life huddles in the deep ravines and vast chasms left in the wake of a series of massively destructive geologic events that included the eruption of a super-volcano that was triggered by the impact of a cometary core that might have been a deliberate act.  The Great Rift is home to several independent city-states, the largest and most prosperous is Devukarsha, the so-called City of Tiers.  Devukarsha is a thriving, hustling, bustling megapolis that extends outwards across numerous worlds, planes and other spaces and even certain prescribed parallel timelines, as do almost all great cities that arise from the deep Infrastructure that propagates and maintains the various over-lapping and inter-penetrating/interconnected gate networks such as the Twelve Pylon Gates that pour forth the waters of twelve distant worlds, each filling a gargantuan harbor-basin that in turn flows into the cascading torrent of the staggered waterfall that becomes the very headwaters of the River Senube which flows outwards into an estuary-zone where dozens of smaller, lesser and minor gates connect with various tributary worlds, most of which are virgin wildernesses or hellish wastelands.  Out past the Lacework Atolls and the floating wharves, in the deeper waters closer to the equator, the Sea Gates blend together the atmospheres and hydrospheres of countless worlds into a unified meta-ecology that zeppelins, steamers & sailing ships, cargo-carrying macro-barges and flocks of migratory birds all use to travel from world to world to world as they spiral around and around.  Then there are the Mugallo Arches that form an ever-expanding tesseractive labyrinth of overlapping worlds that reaches outwards unto entirely new galaxies and the Obelisk Gates previously detailed, just to name two more such networks.  The city is huge, vast; it contains multitudes on myriad levels both figuratively and literally.

"Devukarsha squats provocatively over the River Senube and its attendant canals as it welcomes all the world to come unto it, enter it, and become infected by it like some fat, overly-decorated whore from one of the impromptu sailor's markets down along the waterfront."

The Poet-Martyr Vu-Chong

Twelve Primary Tiers have been elegantly sculpted out of the overlapping layers of regolith and fractured bedrock left in the wake of the cosmic violence that shaped Riskail.  Each Tier is an ecology unto itself, yet they all interact as part of a greater whole.  The oghmic-tribes wander the old growth forests cultivated deep within various subsidiary canyons while tall cernun, sleek hourynn and luminous dryanni tend to the forty-thousand different species of trees that grow down the jumbled and tumbled sides of their canyon-preserves to form copses and woodlands extending across and over and through the main precincts of the main cluster of the megapolis into the estuarial parks and down to the shores of the central sea itself.  Green parklands, botanical gardens, herbariums, mycodomes, and jewel-like hothouses in a multitude of designs and geometrical shapes criss-cross the entire expanse of the city-state.  Trails extend outwards from the very heart of the most central urban districts to the farthest agrifields, freeholds, isogardens and the wilderness regions beyond.  On foot, by bike or tram, however one chooses, the most crowded sections of the city are less than ten minutes away from the howling wilderness, and that is without resorting to the gates or the more rapid forms of mass transit that flow seamlessly beneath the skin of the city.  Self-pedalling rikshaws prowl the lower esplanades looking for passengers, while translucent streetcars connect a series of platforms that extend from the waterfront to the Second Tier.  Like electricity, fresh water, clean air or greenspaces, public transport is just another amenity that has assumed the ubiquity of a civic-right.  It's expected.  Taken for granted.

Utopia?  Hardly.  Beautiful, certainly.  It should be; it was designed to be beautiful.  Many of the people who live within the city were likewise designed to fulfill their roles or obligations to Society as well.  But the designers, the care-taking machines, the self-perpetuating Infrastructure and all the other features, functions and processes intrinsic and endemic to urban existence in Devukarsha can not do a thing about human nature.  People are people, no matter if they have enough to eat, a place to live or mechanical slaves to handle all the drudgery for them, they will always find the fly in the ointment, the flaws to complain about, the things that they cannot have and desperately want all the more precisely because they are out of reach.  Just as in all of previous human history, one thing leads to another and someone lets loose a smart-ass serpent in the garden.

Survival is not enough.

The City knows this, understands it on a level that the inhabitants are incapable of appreciating. In a million little decisions and subtle choices behind the scenes, the City acts to maintain a healthy and prosperous balance, to perpetuate itself and provide for its inhabitants.  All of its inhabitants.

Only Human

"Nothing that is Human is Alien to Me"

Terentius / Terrence

What does it mean to be human?  Defining 'human' and what constitutes humanity is a central theme of a great deal of literature. I've been digging through a variety of Buddhist, Theosophist, Rosicrucian and other manuscripts for a while now, and so for a slight change of pace I thought that I'd see what an atheist thought on this matter. If you plug in "Defining Human" into Google, you'll find a LOT of alternatives if you dislike the following quote:

"The present limits of our concept of humankind are not obvious and not universal. They have been attained as the product of a long, hard struggle in the Western world to find a way of understanding humanity which embraces communities formerly excluded by racism and ethnocentrism, while insisting on a clear distinction between humans and non-humans."

from: Humankind: A Brief History

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

(Read a Review of this book here)

No, that doesn't define human, but it states the problem we run into when we attempt to define humanity and the guy does it really well, or so I thought. It's a thorny issue, and one that is increasingly getting serious scrutiny as all sorts of legalities will be getting dragged into the mix as technology ramps up and we start seeing the benefits and after-shocks of the Human Genome Project and other, similar endeavors that are bringing us all sorts of ways to discriminate against people that our ancestors couldn't have even imagined possible.  But apart from the fairly low-level stuff like insurance companies rejecting or dropping people based upon their genetic pre-disposition to various health risks, just wait until we get such fun stuff as home-cloning kits.  We already are wrestling with the ethical, moral and legal ramifications of products derived from human tissues -- and the questions of who can patent/own such things and whether or not doing so is slavery, child abuse, or an abomination that must be stopped at all costs...or another aspect of progress (with a capital P), technological development that has transcended the boundaries of conventional human experience, and just the tip of the whole biological remodelling-renaissance awaiting us on the otherside of the Singularity. This is some serious stuff.  In fact the struggle to define humanity is at the very crux and heart of the emerging culture war between the semi-new religion of Science/Technology (the church of the singularity?) and the established/traditional faiths. Forget Conservatives versus Liberals; this fight will be much more interesting, and potentially far more lively, active and extreme. In fact the only thing that will likely get even more heated will be the debate over artificial intelligence and what Hugo de Garis calls Artilects, such as he details in his book The Artilect War.

So defining humanity going forwards will be just as messy as it always has been in the past, and it is extremely likely that the process is going to be a stressful, potentially militant/violent process that will have at least two major influences on the outcome rooted in technology and our response/reaction to them. Cool. Drama, conflict, tension and the swelter of ideas and beliefs that come from this will drive loads of good soap opera-esque fiction where people work out the various fears, fallacies and radical truths that come part and parcel with the new technology, just like how folks worked out the whole end-of-life issue. Oops. Guess we'll have to settle that one as well. What will happen if a person is brought back from death by way of some sort of AI-based personality recording--are they still the same person with all attendant rights, or something else, something lesser/other? Man oh man do we ever have a lot of stuff to sort out, and I haven't even mentioned the implications of nanotechnology or eugenics yet.

"What's the future of mankind?  How do I know?  I got left behind."

I Don't Know, Ozzy

Humans currently delude themselves into believing the Victorian foolishness that we somehow dominate the world, which is utter bullshit.  We impose our culturally-mandated will upon the world based upon our politics, religions, technologies and economies, but the world responds, reacts and often lashes back.  Consider the last few hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and out-of-control fires that have been in the news in the last few months.  Humans had to fight like heck just to survive, escape or get things back to some semblance of normality in some pretty harsh circumstances, and in some cases things still aren't back to normal and may well never be.  Like it or not, Nature can sometimes veto our grand designs.

When you look at things outside the blinders of the 'Humans Rule' creed, you'll notice that our cities are extremely susceptible to environmental backlashes like flooding, earthquakes, mudslides, forest fires and so on and so forth.  Nature Rules.  At least for now.  Just think of how something as small and insignificant as a virus can play havoc with modern society--remember H1N1 or Avian Flu?  Viruses kick our collective butts more often than we'd like to admit or even think about.  But I'm not a fan of viruses.  Bacteria are more interesting.  Bacteria outnumber and inhabit and consume all living things on this planet and they also have a greater range of biomes they can inhabit to boot.  Plus they are older than we are.  They will survive any nuclear war we care to extinctify ourselves with and they are already colonizing the solar system (probably).  They may even have a form of collective intelligence/sentience.  We don't know if bacterial colonies can think or not.  Those giant mats off the coast of South America might be dreaming of shining flying purple wolfhounds, but we'd never know it, unless we listened to Jon Anderson, of course.   But that does not make them superior to humans, unless you want to strictly measure population, diversity, longevity...oh...it does get kind of one-sided, doesn't it?   The notion of bacterial intelligence is intriguing to me and I expect it to rear its amorphous faceless head in Riskail shortly.  But how will such things interact with humanity?  How will they challenge/change our definitions of human?  Then there is the matter of mycelial networks...thinking 'shrooms.  But mushrooms are not just for hippies anymore.  Check this out:



As if thinking goo or talking toadstools wasn't bad enough.  And it wasn't.  Consider this; both bacteria and fungi can colonize and infect human hosts.  If they are capable of intelligence, the infection could either extend their networked sentience into human bodies which are then used as vehicles, or maybe, just maybe the infection can bring about a bridge-event where they become able to communicate with us via their infected/enslaved hosts/ambassadors.  Just imagine bacterial colonies with PR staff and voting rights.  The mind reels.  But then Clades are very similar to the bacterial colonies in many important respects, and maybe the bacterial consciousness(es) will make themselves known through the various clades.  Each clade being derived from a central template-profile, each member of the clade being directly related to all other members of the clade has a lot in common with a bacterial colony.  Maybe they'll be in cahoots with one another, or secretly opposed to each others' nefarious plans, or locked in a bitter struggle for dominance with the human genome as their battlefield.  Could be a cool movie in there, and maybe Shatner might make a cameo.

Humans are already colonized by bacteria.  We are their hosts and their vehicles, and making the leap of having intelligent bacteria driving a body instead of the native human software isn't that much of a leap at all.  They could be out there even now, amongst us, unsuspected and working their weird wills upon the world looking like one of us.

Maybe we need more etheogenists out there trying to open up lines of communication before the mycological empire decides to eliminate us with tailored toxins.  Thanks to Stamet, I've been really digging into the information available on mushrooms and it is mind-boggling to say the least.  In Riskail there are mycelial colony-towers, fungal cysts, deliberately maintained old growth forests, and a dozen different varieties of fungal-descended hominids, some of which are more than partially human.  Some humans are likewise not colonized so much as hybridized with mycelial-derived genes such as the spore-nymphs.

But that goes well past uncomfortable through weird and on into stuff that doesn't even go half as far as Stamet is talking about doing in real life at his site.  Lovecraft has nothing on this guy, and his ideas are simply amazing -- and he may well end up changing the world in ways that nobody saw coming prior to him.

Maybe I should have started with the insects.  They outnumber us too, and they're also more diverse in over-all terms (collectively) but less well distributed and they really suck in terms of longevity and over-all GDP.  But that is now.  What will happen when someone designs modified bugs with enhanced brain-power, or when we decide to upgrade our pets with implantable PDA-esque chips, or some other, similar scenario?  Ever see the movie Them?  How about H. G. Wells' Empire of the Ants?  Telepathic Tyrant-Ants who enslave people?  Cool.  Those will make it into Riskail, definitely.  Ever hear of The Giant Spider Invasion?  Lame, but the little rolly-balls that crack open to release mutant spiders--that's a priceless gimmick.  Then there's Kingdom of the Spiders (with Shatner!) which promises that your nightmares will never be the same.  Yeah.  Well, maybe not so much.  Spider Labyrinth has some seriously creepy stuff going on but it quickly descends into WWE-level violence as burlesque.  The spider crawling back into the arm was very icky and will also make it into Riskail when I introduce the arachnohosts and the huskivite egg-tender cultists.

Insects make excellent cops and even better villains.  So do bureaucracies.  Insect-bureaucracies are incredibly frightening.  Humans with insect/arachnid/crustaceal attributes are incredibly old tropes; before Ditko sketched the first rendering of Spiderman there was Khepri, an ancient Egyptian deity with the head of a beetle.  Ever see Mimic? 

Unless you grow all of your own stuff on a hermetically-sealed asteroid farm, you already eat genetically modified food or foodstuffs that are tainted by them thanks to Big Agri-Business.  It's not a conspiracy theory, just a fact of modern life.  In many ways it's just the logical outcome of developing better breeding methods for livestock or Brother Mendel's experiments with pea plants.  We live in a time of technology that surpasses quite a bit of the prognostications of old science fiction and it's only getting warmed-up.  Change is accelerating.  So is stress.  The so-called Singularity, much like Mr. Hoover's  Greenspan's Bernanke's Prosperity, is supposedly just around the corner.  Even if it is, (whatever it winds up being), we probably won't recognize it until we're on the otherside looking back and academics are arguing over the semantics of the transition's description for the sake of the histories that they'll be composing for posterity or as part of a pernicious and venal info-war being waged over the ownership of the past.  So things will not have necessarily changed that much at least.  I won't even go into what happens if the singularity fails or stalls-out, though Vernor Vinge already has.

It's easy to see why so many people would prefer to go back to a supposedly 'simpler' time.  The utopian impulse is nothing new.  Thomas Moore didn't invent it, he just wrote a book about it and got blamed for it ever afterwards.  Even Plato bitched about the disrespectful slacker-kids in his day in the Republic.  But all in all, there never were 'simpler' times, they were differently complicated and just as soap opera-esque as any period of human civilization.  If anything soap operas are what most of history revolves around; scandals, who's sleeping with whom, miscommunication, deceit, underhanded acts of emotional betrayal and sabotage, lies, damn lies, and so on.  One of the best ways to appreciate ancient Rome is to watch the BBC adaptation of Robert Graves'masterpiece of historical soap opera: I, Claudius.  There's more history oozing from Graves' work of fiction than some textbooks manage to deliver and it has Brian Blessed, Derek Jacobi, some guy named Patrick Stewart and the impossible to forget Sian Phillips as Livia.  Plus John Hurt as Caligula.  Oh just go watch the thing already!  If that doesn't get you interested in history, nothing will.  Two thousand years ago, give or take a few decades, and Claudius' Rome doesn't seem oh so simple after all, does it?

Imperial Rome, Big Business, Genetically-Modified Organisms, the Singularity, Nature flipping us the bird, extinctions, migrations, bacteria, Soap Operas, plagues: what does all that have to do with humans, the matter of races and sentient species in Riskail?  Plenty.

The Human Descended include a variety of Ethnocentric Clans, Technocentric Clades and Biocentric Tribes as well as pseudo-nationalist Dynastic Groups and Lineages that merge and splinter to form the various minor and major Houses.  The affluent and prosperous Families form cliques and in time can gain standing as Nobles who form Lineages and Dynasties.  The less fortunate Families become Craftsfamilies if they join the Guilds and devote themselves to specific arts, crafts or technologies.  Others join the Unions and take up the tasks of maintaining and attending to civilization and society both in terms of the work of establishing culture, creating knowledge and defining, interpreting and critiquing all that is known.  At the bottom end of things are the faceless proletariat, people who occupy such a dim and distant position to those at the height of power that they register only as brownish-gray hazy smudges unless their social superiors actually make an effort to observe them.

Riskail is a classist society.  Not rigidly so, but definitely everyone has their place and it is a matter of public record.  Your allegiances and affiliations are socially obvious, unless one takes great pains to occlude the truth or develop a layer of obfuscation or misdirection, or one purchases privacy at great (exorbitant) expense.  Secret societies and sects have developed numerous ingenius ways to hide in plain sight, or to cloak their true identities by infiltrating other, more acceptable and agreeable cliques or groups.  For all of the quick and easy open access to such information, it doesn't tell much that is truly useful.  Discredited political orthodoxies linger on amongst students on campuses across Riskail, but mostly as affectations and extracurricular cliques, rarely as anything serious beyond the occasional art-riot or protest-party.  Factions transcend biology, being open even unto Abstract Intelligences and in some few cases there are Factions more powerful than some Houses.

There are 12 Ascendent Houses and 12 Descendent Houses, each one of which has its armorial insignia arranged in sequence around the circumference of the face of the Great Clock.  Every House has its hour either of the Day or the Night.  The Descendent Houses were once the Great Powers of Riskail, occupying the massive arcology-mansions along the First Tier, but they have since been supplanted by the Ascendent Houses which are not exclusively parochially-tied to Riskail.  Thus it is that the older Houses of Riskail are eager to find some way to reclaim or regain their former glories, often engaging in risky ventures, subsidizing voyages of exploration, or supporting Mad Wizards or Insane Geniuses in the hopes of gaining an edge, an advantage, or an opportunity.  The Houses encompass both mercantile and corporate interests, and no corporation operates in Riskail that doesn't have patronage from one of the Houses.  The Nobility have their various ranks and titles based upon the lands they manage and/or the followers that they lead either through tyrannical or other means.  The accountant-heralds who register such things make no distinction beyond known and verifiable quantities and they do not judge the quality of such things as it is not their place.

Social Status and ones' Social Class is not so much fixed as firm. It can be modified and even transcended through merit, distinction, largesse from a Patron, or escaped from via elevation earned through various forms of service, bribes, achievement, blackmail, contractual arrangements, marriage, inheritance, bequests from philanthropic-types, or other means. It is a much cherished notion, myth and enduring bit of folklore that even one born amongst the lowest of the low can rise above the mob to become great and powerful. Genes can be augmented, modified, enhanced or even replaced when needed or desirable. All attributes can be improved upon or refined via implants, surgery or other adjuncts either machine-wise or organically, even psychically in some cases. Death itself is not a barrier to personal accomplishment as the Helical Cathedraes provide eventual rebirth and recovery for even the poorest of the citizenry who cannot afford a more prestigious form of reincarnation.  And of course the Necrosophics are always an option as well, should one wish to shed this mortal coil and go off into the deep blackness of the void-between-worlds.

The underclasses aren't just economically disadvantaged, in many cases they are entirely other races or species including varieties of Urfolk, Drones, Androids, Biocastes, Registered Hybrids and the Animal Descended.  Many of the servants who are not machine-derived are genetically designed and engineered to serve in their tasks, duties or roles.  This includes a wide array of clone-slaves, pod-born, vitroids, militarized paramanity, and ornamental humanoids such as the Solmiri, Kashurri and Treen.  Dronecops are bred from registered lineages of wasp and hornet-derived templates established millennia ago as ruthlessly reliable peace-keeping forces.  Urfolk are those Animal-Descendent peoples who have been able to develop their own cultures and to find some place in the greater scheme of things such as the goatling sherpas of Immakku or the Lutrin river-tenders or the various avials, saurials or weirder forms like the milicae or loricae descended from human-millipede hybrids. 

What is human and what is not becomes harder and harder to answer and after a while you have to wonder if the matter of sentience and the capacity for thought is a separate issue and needs to be broken-out from the whole human question.  Where do machines fit into this mix?

"The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends."

OSCAR WILDE

The Machine Descended form Abstract Collogues (collective simultaneous dialogues amongst closed-loop AI networks), and Materialist Robotic Enclaves, often with cyborg interface-races to act as go-betweens and envoys betwixt the biologicals and the mechanicals, the abstract and the manifest. The Drem serve no one -- not even themselves. The Vokad are a hyper-obsessed technological-materialist faction of autonomous robots who are so caught-up within their own frame of reference that they no longer consider humanity to be of any concern, often overwriting or obliterating or annexing huge swaths of human-occupied matter with no regard for the consequences. The Nhlorul are colonizing communities of nanological hybridized swarm-sentience that discretely occupy various and sundry voluntary host organisms, but what they are hiding from is unclear. The Jeheen are immaculately sculpted and designed synthetic humanoids who serve as vectors for a vast array of Abstract Consciousness who move, act and speak through them when they desire to deal with slowmanity. But those are the more visible, more articulate forms of the Machine Descended, those who interact or respond to humanity as equals, superiors or competitors. Far more numerous are the masses of unnamed and unknown machines that make up the Infrastructure, the systems that keep the gates open and the meta-scale public amenities such as the River Senube running, or the machines who occupy the matrix underneath the aesthetically variable cobblestones of the very roads and walkways of the cities of Riskail and maintain and repair them continually, perpetually, eternally.


I guess that defining humanity is going to have to be worked out as part of the overall setting and not be some sort of gimme.  Using the mechanics of a game to work out the answer could be fun.  It certainly is a central theme of a good deal of fiction and non-fiction as well.  I'm certainly not going to answer the question definitively any time soon, especially as we learn more about the way matter functions on the below-nano scale, mycelial networks, nature's extremophiles, and all sorts of other stuff that we're only just now getting around to perceiving let alone studying.  Any definition for what constitutes humanity will just have to get worked out though the fiction and the game and maybe that's okay.